Turns out there’s nothing better than sharing a stage with kindred souls. A photo of our five readers at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl on Saturday night and a link to the Lit Crawl Live in the Mission article.
With writers Sweta Chawla, Mindy Urlaub, Christina Julian, Dorothy O’Donnell, and me.
To understand why thousands of people have marched out of Central America and headed North, you must understand what came before. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 led to the installation of a series of brutal dictators. Decades of violence followed in a 36-year conflict that ended in 1996. Some 200,000 civilians were killed, most of them indigenous people who lived in mountain villages. A tradition of violence, repression, and discrimination continues in Guatemala today.
If you have any connection to this beautiful, complicated country, please read at least the first several paragraphs of this excellent summary by Billy Perigo, written in 2016.
I’m excited to read at Lit Crawl with my Write On Mamas friends, this Saturday at 8 PM. I’m the first reader in our group, at Carousel Consignment on 2391 Mission Street, San Francisco.
Although excited might not be the right word: Anxious, nervous, apprehensive.
The antidote to stage fright is practice, I know. Which I do. And still.
The good news is that by tomorrow night, the reading will be behind me. I will have survived, as I always do.
In the scheme of things to be afraid of, reading out loud in front of people is not huge. It barely registers.
That’s what I tell myself.
Focus on the words and the meaning of the words. Aim to communicate.
If you’re like me, you plan ahead. Cooperative for Education is offering a Heritage Tour to Guatemala in July 2019, designed specifically for adoptive families. My kids love experiencing Guatemala with families like ours: This is a great way to do it.
I am an adoptive mother to two children born in Guatemala.
My book, Mamalita: An Adoption Memoir (Seal Press, 2010) is available on Amazon.
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You are currently browsing the Mamalita – an adoption blog by Jessica O'Dwyer on Guatemalan adoption blog archives for October, 2018.
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